The NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) consists of voluntary guidelines and standards to manage cybersecurity risks across an entire organization or its critical infrastructures. It offers a flexible, repeatable, cost-effective approach towards managing cybersecurity risks.
The framework was originally imagined as a cybersecurity risk management system for the critical infrastructures of the United States. Today, it has been widely implemented in the private and public sectors, across organizational departments, and around the globe.
ManageEngine's guide to implementing the NIST Cybersecurity Framework
Examine your current security posture and prioritize opportunities to strengthen it.
Assess risks objectively and formulate an action plan to bring them within your risk tolerance level.
Comply with other existing global standards and mandates easily.
Focus on critical service delivery components to make the implementation process cost-effective.
Use the framework's common language to convey cybersecurity risks and requirements to all stakeholders.
Ensure the products and services from your partners meet critical security goals.
The framework core consists of key risk management activities that help organizations realize cybersecurity outcomes that align with their business objectives and priorities.
The core is comprised of six functions: govern, identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover. It offers a holistic strategy for understanding potential security threats, mitigating their impacts, and recovering with minimal business disruptions.
The functions are not meant to be a serial path towards a desired state. They outline a set of actions that can be performed concurrently and continuously to develop an organizational culture that addresses emerging cybersecurity risks.
The implementation tiers help organizations describe how sophisticated their cybersecurity management program is. The tiers can serve as an internal benchmark to standardize an organization-wide cybersecurity approach.
The tiers are not maturity levels. Organizations should move towards a higher tier when they have the resources and budget to reduce their cybersecurity risks.
Irregular, reactive risk management practices with limited awareness of cybersecurity risks
Some awareness of cybersecurity risks but a limited establishment of a risk management program at the organization level
A consistent cybersecurity risk management program across the organization with processes to respond based on changes in the threat landscape
An advanced response system capable of effectively improving the risk management program based on previous incidents and predictive indicators
The framework profile helps organizations understand their current cybersecurity posture in terms of the outcomes described in the framework. After assessing their current profile, organizations can develop their target profile by selecting key outcomes outlined under the framework functions based on their business goals, risk tolerance, and resources.
By creating a current profile and comparing it with the target profile, organizations can identify opportunities to improve their cybersecurity program. Based on the priority and estimated cost of the corrective efforts, organizations can plan for cybersecurity improvement measures.
While the NIST CSF consists of both technical and non-technical controls for managing cybersecurity risks,
we will help you implement the technical aspects of it.
Govern
Identify
Protect
Detect
Respond
Recover
Understand and manage the mission of the cybersecurity program, legal requirements, and stakeholder expectations.
Establish and communicate the organization's priorities, risk tolerance, and assumptions in terms of its risk management.
Establish cybersecurity roles, responsibilities, and authorities to foster accountability and streamline processes.
Establish and communicate policies for managing the organization's cybersecurity.
Review the outcomes of the cybersecurity risk management program and adjust the strategy if required.
Identify and establish cybersecurity risk management practices to manage risks associated with your supply chains.
Identify business-critical assets, systems, and people and manage them according to your business objectives and risk strategy.
Discover hardware and software assets in your IT network through periodic scans to keep the asset information up to date.
Identify and manage hardware and software assets within your network.
Discover sensitive data and classify it based on its sensitivity.
Identity and manage computers, users, and groups in your AD and Microsoft 365 environments.
Consolidate data from all applications to analyze organization-wide assets, their patch compliance, assigned users, and any associated risks through unified dashboards.
Determine the cybersecurity risks to your organization, assets, and people.
Obtain a risk score for all entities and users in the organization. Discover the riskiest assets and users based on historical baselines and ML. Based on these risk score thresholds, admins can set up alerts.
Discover, assess, and prioritize vulnerable endpoints in your network.
Detect the vulnerabilities in your hybrid environment and take action on the fly. Detect and analyze security risks in your cloud infrastructure.
Monitor your network with insider threat detection capabilities.
Generate dynamic trust scores for users and devices based on their compliance with security policies. Based on these trust scores, admins can enforce automated actions to terminate or deny user access, request valid reasons to access resources, and do even more.
Identify processes and procedures to improve your organization's cybersecurity risk management program.
Ensure only authorized users and devices can access physical and logical assets and manage risks associated with unauthorized access.
Identify and authorize access to business-critical resources and spot unusual privileged activities based on user roles and predefined access policies.
Automate the authorization of user access to resources based on the user's organizational role.
Prevent privilege abuse by analyzing the access permissions of users.
Detect threats to both users and devices. Monitor all successful and unsuccessful access attempts. Trigger response workflows to log out compromised or suspicious logged-in users or entities.
Establish awareness and training programs to help your personnel perform their cybersecurity duties properly.
Manage and safeguard data according to your organization's risk policy to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information.
Automate the detection and classification of personal data, audit file access, and establish policies to ensure the secure usage and transfer of sensitive information. Configure data leak prevention and file copying policies to secure endpoints.
Back up and protect your environments, such as AD and Microsoft 365.
Track critical activities such as creations, deletions, access, modifications, and renaming related to your files and folders. Get alerted to suspicious activities through file integrity monitoring.
Manage your organization's hardware and software and their maintenance to ensure their integrity and availability.
Automate the distribution of OS and third-party patches to endpoints according to configured deployment policies.
Perform agent-based scans periodically to uncover emerging vulnerabilities, network misconfigurations, high-risk software, active ports, and more.
Schedule periodic maintenance activities through automatically generated requests.
Set up rules to receive alerts about unexpected activities in the network. Also, receive alerts based on anomaly detection rules that compare actual activities to baseline activities.
Manage your organization's security architecture and infrastructure to protect asset integrity and organizational resilience.
Establish incident response workflows that get triggered when any alarms go off on any ITOps monitoring tool. Schedule periodic maintenance activities through automatically generated requests.
Adopt a Zero Trust security approach by leveraging a trust scoring mechanism for users and devices as well as policy-based access controls for users.
Configure stringent passcode and device locking policies to protect corporate assets. Ensure endpoint security with proactive scans and automated defense mechanisms.
Safeguard your network from internal and external agents by detecting threats.
Limit malware intrusions by blocklisting malicious executables.
Proactively defend against firmware vulnerabilities with daily automatic updates sourced from NIST.
Identify and respond to ransomware attacks through threshold-based alerts about suspicious file access patterns.
Monitor assets and information systems for incidents and verify security measures regularly.
Monitor and collect extensive audit data from servers, firewalls, applications, and endpoints and receive real-time alerts about incidents.
Detect certificates that are susceptible to SSL/TLS vulnerabilities such as POODLE and Heartbleed.
Detect rogue devices in the network and block their access.
Monitor file activities, data transfers, and application usage to spot anomalous activities.
Monitor your organizational assets and systems to recognize and analyze risks posed by identities.
Scan the entire network to detect vulnerabilities and remediate them with patch deployment.
Detect zero-day network threats, firewall rule anomalies, and rogue devices.
Utilize Network-Based Application Recognition’s intelligent recognition and classification abilities, deep packet inspection, and traffic pattern analysis to keep your application bandwidth usage and network traffic in check.
Monitor network security devices and gain real-time insights into threats and compliance.
Analyze anomalies and indicators of compromise to understand potentially adverse events and identify cybersecurity incidents.
Analyze critical information from security events to identify threats. Also, detect anomalies and get alerts about them.
Detect anomalies and insider threats with AI-driven identity analytics.
Analyze past events to identify and fix loopholes in your defense strategy. Reduce your attack surface proactively by predicting accounts and users that are likely to become vulnerable due to password expirations.
Manage your incident response plan to respond to detected incidents in accordance with your organization's cybersecurity risk management strategy.
Remediate threats and vulnerabilities by automating the deployment of patches for OSs and third-party applications.
Modify or revoke NTFS permissions to limit the exposure of sensitive files.
Provide technicians with secure remote access to endpoints for timely incident remediation. Record and archive sessions to aid future forensic analysis and audits.
Automate and accelerate threat response through standard workflows and streamline incident management by integrating with ticketing tools.
Codify your incident response playbook with incident management workflows to accelerate the resolution process.
Conduct forensics to understand the impacts of incidents and ensure effective responses.
Coordinate response activities with internal and external stakeholders as required by laws and policies.
Establish processes to limit the impacts of incidents and resolve them promptly.
Reduce repeat incidents by documenting the risks, identifying the root causes, and automating work-arounds or fixes.
Automate fault remediation actions based on incident alerts.
Create automated response workflows associated with particular incidents or sequences of events. These workflows can mitigate the impacts of incidents.
Perform and maintain recovery processes to restore the systems and services affected by cybersecurity incidents.
Restore objects from your AD, Entra ID, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Exchange, and Zoho WorkDrive environments.
Make shadow copies of all the files on your endpoints and revert compromised files to their most recent copies.
Stop or start processes, change firewall rules, and make AD changes automatically after an incident to enable recovery.
Coordinate with internal and external stakeholders on restoration activities.
Download our guide to take a closer look at
how your organization can implement the NIST CSF.
The complete implementation of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework requires a variety of solutions, processes, people, and technologies. The solutions mentioned above are some of the ways in which IT management tools can help with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework implementation. Coupled with other appropriate solutions, processes, and people, ManageEngine's solutions help comply with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. This material is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be considered as legal advice for NIST Cybersecurity Framework implementation. ManageEngine makes no warranties, express, implied, or statutory, as to the information in this material.